Peacock review: A ton of free, ad-supported NBC content, but it doesn’t work on every device

Peacock, the new streaming service from Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, is an experiment of sorts: Its tiled interface and big-name network make it look on the surface like a Netflix or Hulu competitor. But its content, which includes live news and sports, new original series and a large back catalog of TV shows and movies — and the fact that it has a free tier — actually makes it more of a top-of-the-line free streaming service, like Pluto TV, Tubi and Roku Channels. (Editor’s note: Pluto TV is owned by ViacomCBS, the parent company of CNET, as are CBS, Showtime and Peacock competitor CBS All Access.)

Peacock’s free tier — which rivals Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus and HBO Max currently lack — offers about 13,000 hours of ad-supported content, with the option to upgrade to premium if you want to, giving you more flexibility. You’ll find shows, movies, news, live sports and skit-style clips, with standouts including Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, The Bourne Identity and Premier League soccer highlights. One of NBC’s most-streamed series, however, The Office, won’t be on the service until January 2021 (you can find it on Netflix until then). And you’ll only get two episodes of new original series, like Brave New World, unless you upgrade to premium. The same goes for the original Psych movie sequel and the popular series Yellowstone.

At launch, Peacock still lacks a number of features, including compatibility with the popular Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, profiles for different users, mobile downloads or 4K HDR streaming — all of which are available on the paid competition like Netflix and Disney Plus. Some of these features are on NBC’s roadmap for the future, but at launch, they’re big disadvantages. 

Read more: Everything you need to know about Peacock

You might not love watching ads, only getting a few episodes of original shows, or that several big features are still missing, but again: It’s free. 

If you upgrade to the premium tier ($4.99 a month or $50 a year for ad-supported; $9.99 a month or $100 a year for ad-free), you’ll get access to the full catalog of 20,000 hours of content, including every episode of the original series. You’ll also get next-day access to new episodes of all current NBC shows (as opposed to just freshman series on the free tier), and even early access to Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon the night they air.

If you’re a big fan of NBC’s stable of shows, want to catch up on some past hit movies or just don’t want to shell out the cash for Netflix or Hulu, the free version of Peacock is great. But paying $5-$10 a month for it when you already have the other major streaming services may  not be worth your while at this point — at least until it adds more must-see originals or bingeworthy favorites like The Office. 

A solid free tier, with some ads

We tested out Peacock’s ad-supported free tier and its ad-supported $4.99 a month premium tier. (You don’t need a credit card to sign up for the free account, just an email address, which is nice.) Peacock promises that you’ll see five minutes or less of ads per hour across both ad-supported tiers. But it does seem like if you pop in and out of a movie or show, the ad count may reset. And at least in my experience, there seemed to be fewer ads on the premium tier than the free tier, but I haven’t tested it out long enough to know for sure. 

While watching Jurassic Park (which, as of Aug. 1, has expired on Peacock and moved over to Netflix) on an Apple TV and a MacBook Air, I saw six ads sprinkled throughout the film, ranging from 20 to 60 seconds each. But when I started it on the iPhone app, I got a notice that I would watch 135 seconds of ads at the beginning, and none for the rest. I’d love to have that option on my Apple TV too to get the ads out of the way, but unfortunately you don’t get to choose your ad format. 

After scrolling around and watching a bunch of ads, when I went back to start Jurassic Park again, there were no ads at all, since I had already seen five minutes’ worth in the previous hour. 

On episodes of Saturday Night Live, there were seven to nine ads sprinkled throughout the episode on both mobile and TV. This is about the same ad experience as watching on Hulu’s $5.99-a-month ad-supported plan, or on regular live TV — but, of course, it’s free. 

Otherwise, the ad experience varied depending on show and device. I don’t love ads (who does?), but they weren’t intrusive enough for me to want to upgrade to a $9.99 plan, at least right now. 

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First Look: Peacock streaming app

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A familiar navigation experience (for the most part)

Navigating through Peacock’s homepage Browse section is similar to other streaming services. There’s a big carousel of “hero” tiles at the top and rows of thumbnails below, labeled Peacock Picks, Continue Watching, Peacock Originals, Featured Films, Laugh Out Loud, Comfort TV and so on. 

Peacock does have a Kids page with a couple of popular shows like Curious George and, on premium, Dragons: Riders of Berk, but the catalog is definitely more adult-focused — you can’t compare its kids’ offerings to those of Disney Plus or HBO Max. You can set parental controls and create a PIN to keep kids from watching anything over the rating of your choosing, though. 

Premium shows are mixed in with free offerings, denoted by a little purple feather in the top left corner. It reminds me a bit of Amazon Prime Video, which has shows included in your subscription mixed in with those you have to pay extra for. The app isn’t forceful in trying to get you to upgrade, though: You’ll only be asked if you want to change to premium if you click on a premium-only show, or if you go to your Account page.

You can stream on up to three devices simultaneously from one account. One negative: Unlike on Netflix, there’s no “skip intro” button, so you’ll have to watch theme songs over and over unless you manually fast-forward.

Browsing deep into NBC’s back catalog

Peacock’s launch comes at a strange time: Due to the coronavirus pandemic shutting down film productions, many of its originals were pushed to 2021 or later. Its launch was also supposed to coincide with NBC’s live coverage of the summer Olympics, which has also been pushed to 2021. 

Still, there’s plenty to watch among the 13,000 hours of free content or 20,000 hours of premium content from NBC and its sister networks and entertainment properties, including Bravo, USA Network, SYFY, Oxygen, E!, CNBC, MSNBC, NBCSN, Golf Channel, Illumination, Universal Kids and Universal Pictures. There’s also some content licensed from rivals, including A&E, ABC, Fox, History, Nickelodeon, DreamWorks Animation, Focus Features, Lionsgate, Warner Bros., Blumhouse, CBS, Showtime, Paramount and The CW (the latter four of which are, to restate, wholly or partly owned by CNET’s parent company, ViacomCBS). 

Some of the best shows available on the free tier now are 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Downton Abbey, Monk and Friday Night Lights, and you get all seasons of each. Upgrade to premium to get the complete run of older shows, including Cheers, Frasier, House, Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond and George Lopez. For some shows, however, you get only a recent handful of seasons or episodes, even on premium. For example, you’ll only find the last six seasons of Saturday Night Live and a handful of episodes of This Is Us. 

The free tier will also get current episodes of freshman NBC shows (those airing their first season) the day after they air, and episodes of other NBC shows one week later. On the premium tier, you’ll get every NBC show the next day. One interesting perk for premium subscribers: Once Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon return to in-studio production, you’ll be able to watch them before they air, at 8 p.m. ET, instead of waiting until 11:30 p.m. ET.

The catalog is far from complete, however. Some shows you might associate with NBC, like Friends, Seinfeld and older seasons of Saturday Night Live, aren’t on Peacock, and won’t be soon, if ever. As mentioned, The Office won’t arrive until January 2021, when Netflix’s contract for the hit show runs out. 

At launch, you’ll find seven originals: Brave New World, The Capture, Intelligence, Psych 2: Lassie Come Home, Where’s Waldo?, Cleopatra In Space and Curious George. Four more are coming later this summer. It remains to be seen if any will become must-watch hits, like The Mandalorian on Disney Plus. 

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In the Movies category, you’ll find hundreds of titles, but relatively few from the past decade. (Think Alfred Hitchcock rather than Bong Joon-ho.) In the Rotten Tomatoes Approved belt, you’ll find about 20 movies, but only two from the past few years (2017’s Phantom Thread and 2018’s Tully). You’ll find tons of classics, however, from Psycho and Rear Window to Do the Right Thing and Reservoir Dogs. 

It appears, however, that many of Peacock’s big-name movies aren’t going to be sticking around for long. On the desktop and iOS versions of the app, you can see how many days you have left to watch a given movie if it’s leaving soon. Children of Men, the original Jurassic Park trilogy and The Matrix trilogy all expired at the end of July, just a few weeks after the service launched. They may come back though, a company representative said. And soon, you’ll be able to see how long you have to watch a given movie before it expires across all platforms.

For titles that aren’t obvious classics, Peacock helpfully displays Rotten Tomatoes ratings. Movie thumbnails may include a red-tomato, “fresh” rating but do not display a score if the movie is rated “rotten.” You can see the score for any movie with a Rotten Tomatoes rating, good or bad, after selecting it.

While some services have started streaming theater-bound movies early (such as Hamilton on Disney Plus), Peacock executives say it has no plans yet to do the same. 

In the News section, you’ll find short clips from NBC News and MSNBC, along with the latest episodes of Nightly News with Lester Holt, Meet the Press, Sunday today with Willie Geist and Dateline NBC. When you click on the tiles for MSNBC or CNBC shows, you’ll only find clips though, as opposed to full episodes. 

Channels and Trending aren’t what you think

From Browse, you can navigate to the Channels section of the app. Channels look kind of like a cable box grid guide, but instead of networks and cable channels, you get rows curated around a show or theme. We were disappointed to find that most of it wasn’t new. The first channel, SNL Vault, shows a mix of Saturday Night Live sketches from over the years. Two others — Fallon Tonight and Seth Myers Now — have full episodes from about a month ago. 

The Office channel is labeled as Office Shorts and shows a scene from one episode here followed by a scene from another episode there, which is not how we like to digest our Office reruns. The Hell’s Kitchen channel does show complete episodes, and we found complete episodes of Ghost Hunters on the Out of this World channel. The rest of the channels, 32 in all, are a mix of true crime, reality TV, news and so on. 

Next to Channels, the Trending tab is also not super useful — scroll through 10 tile-like pages that start autoplaying news, late night clips or sports highlights. It’s kind of like flipping through 10 TV channels, and finding only YouTube clips. 

In terms of news, you can find some live programming. NBC News Now Live is one of the channels, and Sky News also streams live. NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and Meet the Press with Chuck Todd will stream same-day on the NBC News Now channel, or in the News tab — which could appeal to YouTube TV subscribers who aren’t pleased with the recent price hike and want to make a switch but still have access to live news. However, you can access all of those live news sites and day-old broadcasts from their websites on desktop, anyway, so they aren’t exclusive to the platform. You’ll also find NBC’s new 24-hour version of the Today Show, called Today All Day, though that includes repackaged Today segments and more lifestyle programming than straight news. 

And when it comes to live sports, the free tier will get some Premier League games, as well as the US Open Championship, the Women’s Open Championship and an NFL Wild Card Playoff Game. On premium, you’ll get more Premier League matches, coverage of the Tour De France, and more than 100 hours of WWE content starting in August. 

Still MIA: Roku and Fire TV, profiles, mobile downloads and 4K HDR

While we can’t complain too much about the free tier, the premium offerings still lack several features that their premium streaming service competitors like Netflix and Hulu already have. 

You can stream Peacock on Apple devices like the iPhone and Apple TV, Google devices like Android phones and Chromecast, Xbox One consoles, PlayStation 4 consoles (when the app launches next week), Vizio SmartCast TVs and LG Smart TVs. But at launch, you can’t watch on popular Roku or Amazon Fire TV devices. 

You also can’t create separate profiles, but Peacock reps said that this feature is high on the list to arrive after launch. In the meantime, you can set parental controls on shows of different ratings and manage them with a PIN. Mobile downloads are not yet available, either — and when they are, they’ll only be for premium ad-free subscribers. 

Peacock also lacks support for 4K HDR video or Dolby Atmos at launch, though the company says both of these are also on the future roadmap. While it still looks pretty good, originals like Brave New World and some of the major action movie franchises like The Matrix would have benefited from upgraded video and sound quality.

You may be able to find a deal based on your cable provider: Comcast X1 and Flex subscribers get the premium with ads version free, or the no-ads version for $4.99 a month. Cox customers get the same deal. 

Should you get Peacock? 

It’s free, so why not try it out? If the ads bug you or you want to watch one of the original shows, you can try out its premium tiers free for seven days as well, or find other deals depending on your platform and cable provider.

Do I expect to add Peacock to my daily streaming routine, alongside Netflix and Hulu? Probably not, at least in the short-term. But is it a great free option for finding some older movies and shows we’ve missed (or want to watch for the millionth time)? Definitely. If you don’t mind watching a few ads, it’s a fun place to explore older movies and a big mix of TV shows, and keep up with current NBC shows, news and some live sports in one spot — especially if you’re already a cord-cutter and looking to expand your options for free.